by Madeleine Schneider
It’s the fourth week of Psychology 101, and Katy Stevenson is well equipped to zone out for the next fifty-five minutes. Luckily, dissociation from insufferably long briefs is one of her specialties, and perhaps the only Army skill that has transferred to college life. All of the eighteen-year-olds in the lecture hall may have written essays in the last ten years, but Katy can out-compete any of them in listening to generally old, generally white, generally men who love to hear themselves talk.
To the left of Katy, her best friend and battle-buddy for life, has already pulled up a never-ending stream of cat memes. The internet is a crutch that the two of them couldn’t access during Army briefs; though, perhaps their Master-Resilience trainer had been intentional with his presentation style. His quarterly death-by-PowerPoint on goal setting and problem solving was testing and training their resilience the whole time.
Emily laughs at a bespectacled kitten, and Katy knows that her friend is satisfied with how the government’s money is being applied to her G.I. benefits.
At the front of the room, Dr. Morrison scribbles on the white board, talking to his illegible chalk paragraphs instead of to the class. His voice is monotone, as it always is. His clothing is disheveled, and his gray combover is sticking up an inch more than usual. Katy is fairly certain that he hates his life as much as his students.
Katy has some experience with this as well. Though, she’s confident that this particular loud, balding man won’t yell about the way her shoes look or force her to run in the dark while singing about her Granny’s love of physical training.
Katy flips open her own laptop, about to join the lecture hall’s congregation of doom scrollers, when something incredible happens.
Dr. Morrison moves one chalk board to the left and draws a triangle. Quite possibly the worst lecturer in academia demonstrates a new teaching method: diagrams.
Katy sits up in her chair as Dr. Morrison does something even more amazing. Turning from the board, he looks out at his students and poses an existential question.
“What is it,” he asks, tapping that precious chalk nub against his palm, “that a person needs?”
The class stares back without answering, shocked silent, and Katy draws a triangle in her notebook.
“Welcome to my favorite lecture: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, where we stress to our ivory-tower, privileged selves that life could be a whole lot worse. A reminder, if you will, that spending a couple hours a night on homework, getting the grade you actually deserve, and coming to lecture isn’t going to kill you.”
Katy watches as the majority of the screens in front of her stop moving. An Insta-famous hopeful, or perhaps it was TikTok these days, starts covertly filming.
“At the bottom of the triangle…” Dr. Morrison draws a line to demarcate a lower section and turns back around. “We have physiological needs. This is something none of you have ever had to think about. Thoughts on what I mean? Ideas? Anyone?”
“Breathing,” he begins, sighing in exasperation as he does so. He writes the word in the bottom section of the triangle. “Okay? Yes. Our body and mind need clean, fresh, oxygen to keep going.”
The CS gas hit Katy’s eyes first. Her mouth is clamped shut, unwilling to take a deep breath even when her drill sergeant starts screaming at her to recite the soldier’s creed.
Tears are pouring out of her eyes, and she can’t see his face. His jack-o-lantern snarl, his furrowed brow, the angry mole that always reminded her of Cindy Crawford, it all disappears behind her uncontrollable, acid crying.
She can’t hold her breath forever. Adrenaline is spilling into her veins just as quickly as her insides are spilling out of every exposed mucus membrane. Her heart is pumping in rapid, whooshing pulses, her muscles need air to fight, to flight. She gasps.
There’s no oxygen, just screaming icy fire-shards ramming their way down her throat.
“I am an American…”
She coughs, gags, heaves. Another part of her insides become her outsides. The MRE looks the same on her drill sergeant’s shoes as it did in the bag, though she can hardly see it.
“Get out,” he howls, not as Cindy Crawford, but as a dark Jedi, safe behind his black, Darth Vader gas mask. Is that the Force clenching her throat, making it impossible to breathe? She always suspected that this man’s sole purpose in life was to kill her and every other Private in basic training.
“Get out!” He shouts again, as Katy wipes snot and spit and soggy pieces of regurgitated First Strike bar from her face. The patriotic, rubberized snack feels like a turd on her chin, and she nearly pukes again.
Outside the gas chamber, she flaps her arms like a deranged pigeon. The sunlight and the screaming and the lack of oxygen makes her heave. She hits her own boots this time and searches for something besides the back of herhand to wipe the vomit from her face.
In her pocket is a letter. It’s her high school friend, talking about her first month in college: too much drinking and a roommate holding back her hair. Katy wants someone holding her hair. Katy wants something other than shoes to catch her barf.
She wipes the paper across her chin, and someone yells at her to keep her hands away from her eyes.
Dr. Morrison continues.
“Food. Right?” He elongates his words so that he can remind the class how unintelligent they are. Maybe he’s not so different from a drill sergeant. “You guys get it. We need sustenance to fuel our bodies.”
“I’m not eating this,” Emily declares, a look of disgust on her face.
Katy tries to keep Emily’s negativity from getting to her. She is finally done with basic combat training, and she’s feeling optimistic. She’s settling in as a soldier. Her body is warming up to military life. It feels good. It feels Army strong.
Katy listens to Emily drone on, as she shovels mouthfuls of 85-degree, beige and yellow mush from a plastic bag into her mouth. The chicken chunks on her spoon are definitely not fresh enough to start marching time, despite what certain cadences claim about Army cooking. In fact, this chicken may have been killed when Katy was in diapers.
There’s no time to heat the meal, but Katy is still fascinated enough by MREs to find the air-temperature sludge enticing. Maybe she’s just hungry, but it doesn’t taste too bad. Plus, one of the boys in basic training showed her how to crumble the MRE’s moisture-sucking crackers over the top of the main course, along with flavor-masking hot sauce. Katy considers herself an aspiring field chef.
“Trans fats!” Emily gasps, guiding her finger across the nutrition facts and the 1.5 billion items on the ingredient list. It consists of 65% neurotoxins and 9000% of the daily salt recommendation.
“You know the FDA declared trans fats unsafe years ago.”
Emily still hasn’t opened her meal, and the squad only has three minutes left to eat.
“Can I have your crackers?” Katy asks through a mouthful of trans fats.
Emily curls her lips before throwing the entire uneaten MRE bag at Katy’s feet.
“Please do.”
It’s impossible to blame the MREs. Most people would claim that the Meals Refused by Everyone have the opposite effect on their bodies. Three hours later, shoved into a dark, airless, plastic latrine, Katy loses three pounds of body weight in two minutes. The trans fats never taste the same.
Her body does not feel good. It does not feel Army strong.
“Water,” Dr Morrison continues when no student offers a suggestion, despite his less than encouraging prompt for participation. “This should be pretty obvious. Are we catching on yet?”
The water coming out of the sink in Katy’s barracks room is sludgy and brown. She lets it run for a few seconds, hoping that doing so will return the color to its usual, barely-pee yellow. A few seconds to flush out the pipes normally does the trick.
Promotion and escape from the barracks were too far away. Maybe she should just marry someone as a means of escape. She could be the extremely unlucrative gold for some digger. Anything’s better than this.
A full minute goes by, and the water is still darker than normal.
“Fuck it.” This is why they bought the water filter.
Emily comes barreling through the door just as Katy places the purifier under the faucet.
“Katy, no!” Emily bellows, knocking the jug to the floor.
Katy watches a small stream of the murky water trickle from the top of the purifier. It moves towards the heart shaped gum stain, a permanent fixture on their tile floor since the American Revolution.
“The sewer pipe exploded!” Emily shrieks. “The basement is a cesspool. The toilets don’t work and the water is shit.”
Katy looks at the sink, notices a scent that she hadn’t before. Perhaps it is just the suggestion of shit, but the room suddenly smells pungent, sweet, and sickly.
“But they’re different pipes, surely,” Katy says as her stomach does a somersault.
Emily just waves her hand at the spout in dismay.
Katy’s eyes roll to the mold spotted ceiling, searching for some sort of salvation. Instead, she sees the graphic doodlings of another long ago soldier. The sticky note covering the phallic graffiti has fallen off again, probably loosened by the free-floating asbestos in the air.
“Let’s go. Pack a bag,” Emily says, trudging over to her room. “They’re moving us to some empty Marine barracks.”
“Marine barracks?” Katy shudders. “And I didn’t think this could possibly get any worse.”
“Shelter.” Dr. Morrison adds the word to the list. “We need to be safe, dry, protected.”
Katy’s eyelids droop lower, lower, lower. She forces them back up. The soft pillow of her M4 is a cloud against her cheek. It’s so unbearably cold outside. It’s colder than a 5AM PT formation. It’s colder than First Sergeant’s glare that time a West Point cadet told him to stand at attention. It’s colder than Fort Drum in the Winter, probably, Katy’s never actually been there.
The rain pounds on her helmet, and the supposedly waterproof poncho drips inside and out.
Katy checks her watch. Forty-five seconds have elapsed. She has to pull security for the next fifty-nine minutes and 15 seconds.
She pulls a mint from her pocket, unwraps the sugar-spice stimulant, and sucks on it violently. There’s a barely perceptible kick of energy.
She checks her watch. Thirty more seconds have elapsed.
Time stretches and shrinks and swirls. She fantasizes about a structure appearing in front of her: nothing huge, just large enough for her to crawl inside, to block the wind and the rain and the cold. Just a door and three walls, a solid roof. Enough room to stand up, maybe a simple seat in the middle.
Katy realizes she’s recreated a porta-potty. Out here, her mind can’t dream up anything grander.
She wiggles her toes in her boots. She can’t feel her toes.
Her watch reads thirty more minutes.
She needs to pee.
It’s too cold. It’s too wet. She’ll just have to hold it.
Fifteen more minutes.
Her bladder starts screaming at her. The thought of warm pee is grossly, weirdly enticing.
Five more minutes.
She can’t hold it. It’s still too cold.
She crabwalks a few feet from the closest sleeping soldier, pulls the poncho over her, and shimmies her pants down.
Whack.
Her heart rate spikes once, then convinces itself that her ears misheard. It falls.
Whack. Whack. Whack. Whack. Whack.
It can’t be. OPFOR? Now? Five minutes from the end of patrol, caught with her butt in the dirt?
“Contact! Sergeant Stevenson, get up! Let’s go.”
Katy groans, fumbles to get her button redone.
Oh dear God, just let them fake, laser-tag shoot her. She can’t go on.
“If your body finds itself in a deficit, it will prioritize physiological needs above all else. Not your cellphones or your TikTok. Is that clear? Now let’s move onto the next row of the hierarchy.”
That doesn’t sound exactly right to Katy. She throws her hand in the air. She can’t help herself.
“Wait, Dr. Morrison. I think there’s something even more important.”
Katy arrives home from her final Army field exercise running on thirty minutes of sleep and fumes, specifically the fumes she inhaled during the twenty-five-minute Humvee drive back to her Company area. She’s barely eaten more than five MREs in as many days, and she’s beyond sick of the metallic and somehow also plastic-y taste of water buffalo hydration.
Her bed calls to her. Her shower calls to her. The greasy, slightly-too-old container of Chinese takeout in the fridge calls to her.
“I get the bathroom first,” Emily hollers, barreling past Katy and into their shared apartment.
Katy grabs Emily from behind, pushes her to the side. This is life or death. She sprints to the bathroom, yanks the door open so that it slams against the wall with a bang. Shut again just as quickly, she throws the lock and breathes a sigh of relief.
Emily pounds her fists against the door.
“No fair. You got it first the last two times.”
Katy takes a deep sigh, blocks out the exasperated sounds of her roommate walking to the couch.
Sticks falls from the inside of her uniform, as she lowers herself onto the seat. A toilet, not a hole in the ground, not a shit-and-garbage filled porta-potty. A porcelain, flushing, beautiful toilet.
Katy poops like a queen.
Maybe Emily is thinking the same thing, because she bites her lip, looks at Katy, and tries not to giggle.
“Toilets,” Katy says firmly, knowing no one but Emily will understand.
“Toilets?” Dr. Morrison looks at Katy with an expression bordering on pity.
Emily lets out a snort and covers her mouth.
“Toilets,” Katy says again. “In the Army Hierarchy of Needs, shelter is not guaranteed, food is shaky at best. Water and breathing? Who really needs them?
“I’m going to prioritize toilets.”
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Madeleine Schneider is an Army Captain working as a cyber capability developer. As a part of the 780th Military Intelligence Brigade, she focuses on machine learning and data science solutions for the Cyber National Mission Force. She is a graduate of the University of Edinburgh and the United States Military Academy.
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